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New institute aims to make Toronto an ‘intellectual centre’ of AI capability

Toronto will host a new institute devoted to artificial intelligence, a major gambit to bolster a field of research pioneered in Canada but consistently drained of talent by major U.S. technology companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

The Vector Institute, an independent non-profit affiliated with the University of Toronto, will hire about 25 new faculty and research scientists. It will be backed by more than $150 million in public and corporate funding in an unusual hybridization of pure research and business-minded commercial goals.

Geoffrey Hinton, who has worked for Google primarily in California since 2013, will soon be working permanently out of the tech giant's Toronto offices and will be the Vector Institute's chief scientific adviser. (Noah Berger / Associated Press file photo)

The province will spend $50 million over five years, while the federal government, which announced a $125-million Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy in last week’s budget, is providing at least $40 million, backers say. More than thirty companies have committed upwards of $80 million over 10 years, including $5 million each from sponsors including Google, Shopify, Loblaws, and several big banks, $2.5 million from a tier that includes Air Canada and Telus, and smaller commitments from a range of homegrown startups like FreshBooks and Deep Genomics.

Hinton will move back to Canada to lead a research team based at the tech giant’s Toronto offices and act as chief scientific adviser of the new institute.

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“It’s certainly the case that there will be other researchers who will want to come back from the States — I’ve had inquiries from quite a number,” Hinton said.

Researchers trained in Canadian artificial intelligence labs fill the ranks of major technology companies, working on tools like instant language translation, facial recognition, and recommendation services. Academic institutions and startups in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal and Edmonton boast leaders in the field, but other researchers have left for U.S. universities and corporate labs.

The goals of the Vector Institute are to retain, repatriate and attract AI talent, to create more trained experts, and to feed that expertise into existing Canadian companies and startups.

“We want those firms to grow to be a great worldwide supplier of AI capability, so that we turn this into a service export to the world, and not have a situation where all Canada does is produce PhDs and send them south,” said Ed Clark, chair of the Vector Institute board and adviser to Premier Kathleen Wynne.

“We want Toronto, Ontario to be one of the core intellectual centres of artificial intelligence research in the world.”

Some members of the institute will be focused purely on research. “We don’t really know where the new big breakthroughs are going to come from in this area,” said Richard Zemel, the institute’s research director and a professor of computer science at U of T.

“We want to make sure we are at the forefront of that, so bringing on people who are doing research is really essential.”

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Hospitals are expected to be a major partner, since health care is an intriguing application for AI. Last month, researchers from Stanford University announced they had trained a deep learning algorithm to identify potentially cancerous skin lesions with accuracy comparable to human dermatologists. The Toronto company Deep Genomics is using deep learning to read genomes and identify mutations that may lead to disease, among other things.

Intelligent algorithms can also be applied to tasks that might seem less virtuous, like reading private data to better target advertising. Zemel says the centre is creating an ethics working group and maintaining ties with organizations that promote fairness and transparency in machine learning. As for privacy concerns, “that’s something we are well aware of. We don’t have a well-formed policy yet but we will fairly soon.”

The institute’s annual funding pales in comparison to the revenues of the American tech giants, which are measured in tens of billions. The risk the institute’s backers are taking is simply creating an even more robust machine learning PhD mill for the U.S.

“They obviously won’t all stay in Canada, but Toronto industry is very keen to get them,” Hinton said. “I think Trump might help there.” Two researchers on Hinton’s new Toronto-based team are Iranian, one of the countries targeted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel bans.

“We hear from the community that Canada is a beacon, a beacon for openness and diversity, but also for our respect for research, science, and evidence-based decision making,” said Kirsty Duncan, federal Minister for Science, speaking on Tuesday about the pan-Canadian AI strategy.

Hinton’s team is an extension of Google Brain, a research group that has made advances in speech and image recognition underlying tools like Google Translate and image search. The company announced it would open a Google Brain group in Montreal last November.

The Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, led by another AI pioneer, Yoshua Bengio, has also received millions in public and private funding, and on Tuesday the Quebec government announced another $100 million for artificial intelligence.

“AI is going to bring a lot of wealth, but if it’s made elsewhere we aren’t going to get a reasonable share of that wealth, even if we contributed to the original science,” Bengio said.

March 30, 2017: This story has been modified with updated information on the institute's sponsors.

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